Agricultural automation is the emerging technologies which heavily rely on computer-integrated management and advanced control systems. The tedious farming tasks had been taken over by agricultural machines in last century, in new millennium, computer-aided systems, automation, and robotics has been applied to precisely manage agricultural production system. With agricultural automation technologies, sustainable agriculture is being developed based on efficient use of land, increased conservation of water, fertilizer and energy resources. The agricultural automation technologies refer to related areas in sensing & perception, reasoning & learning, data communication, and task planning & execution. Since the literature on this diverse subject is widely scattered, it is necessary to review current status and capture the future challenges through a comprehensive monograph. In this book we focus on agricultural automation and provide critical reviews of advanced control technologies, their merits and limitations, application areas and research opportunities for further development. This collection thus serves as an authoritative treatise that can help researchers, engineers, educators, and students in the field of sensing, control, and automation technologies for production agriculture.

This book brings audiences the enchanting melodies passing down from generation to generation in the Zhuang community, which are on the brink of extinction. Specifically, it sheds light on the origin, evolution and artistic features of Zhuang folk song in the first place, and then it shifts to their English translation based on meta-functional equivalence, through which the multi-aesthetics of Zhuang folk song have been represented. At length, forty classic Zhuang folk songs have been selected, and each could be sung bilingually in line with the stave. This book benefits researchers and students who are interested in music translation as well as the Zhuang ethnic music, culture and literature. It also gives readers an insight into musicology, anthropology and intercultural study.

Presenting the concept and design and implementation of configurable intelligent optimization algorithms in manufacturing systems, this book provides a new configuration method to optimize manufacturing processes. It provides a comprehensive elaboration of basic intelligent optimization algorithms, and demonstrates how their improvement, hybridization and parallelization can be applied to manufacturing. Furthermore, various applications of these intelligent optimization algorithms are exemplified in detail, chapter by chapter. The intelligent optimization algorithm is not just a single algorithm; instead it is a general advanced optimization mechanism which is highly scalable with robustness and randomness. Therefore, this book demonstrates the flexibility of these algorithms, as well as their robustness and reusability in order to solve mass complicated problems in manufacturing. Since the genetic algorithm was presented decades ago, a large number of intelligent optimization algorithms and their improvements have been developed. However, little work has been done to extend their applications and verify their competence in solving complicated problems in manufacturing. This book will provide an invaluable resource to students, researchers, consultants and industry professionals interested in engineering optimization. It will also be particularly useful to three groups of readers: algorithm beginners, optimization engineers and senior algorithm designers. It offers a detailed description of intelligent optimization algorithms to algorithm beginners; recommends new configurable design methods for optimization engineers, and provides future trends and challenges of the new configuration mechanism to senior algorithm designers.

Presenting the concept and design and implementation of configurable intelligent optimization algorithms in manufacturing systems, this book provides a new configuration method to optimize manufacturing processes. It provides a comprehensive elaboration of basic intelligent optimization algorithms, and demonstrates how their improvement, hybridization and parallelization can be applied to manufacturing. Furthermore, various applications of these intelligent optimization algorithms are exemplified in detail, chapter by chapter. The intelligent optimization algorithm is not just a single algorithm; instead it is a general advanced optimization mechanism which is highly scalable with robustness and randomness. Therefore, this book demonstrates the flexibility of these algorithms, as well as their robustness and reusability in order to solve mass complicated problems in manufacturing. Since the genetic algorithm was presented decades ago, a large number of intelligent optimization algorithms and their improvements have been developed. However, little work has been done to extend their applications and verify their competence in solving complicated problems in manufacturing. This book will provide an invaluable resource to students, researchers, consultants and industry professionals interested in engineering optimization. It will also be particularly useful to three groups of readers: algorithm beginners, optimization engineers and senior algorithm designers. It offers a detailed description of intelligent optimization algorithms to algorithm beginners; recommends new configurable design methods for optimization engineers, and provides future trends and challenges of the new configuration mechanism to senior algorithm designers.

This book systematically discusses Case Based Reasoning (CBR) in the views of theories, methods, and related problems and experiences. The book can be used as a reference in actual applications, in which the research of a few scholars and engineers in the field are introduced. The book is divided into nine different chapters, mainly discussed in the following three aspects: 1) Advances and developments in strategies and specific areas of CBR theory, such as the research of semantic similarity, are introduced in Chapters One, Two and Three in detail; 2) Related research achievements of the applications of CBR in power system analysis, operation and control. These applications include small signal stability early warning, multiple power disturbance recognition, transient stability assessment, fault diagnosis expert system of power transformer, and fault diagnosis and reliability prediction of highspeed railway traction power supply system, which are concretely given out in Chapters Four, Five, Six, Seven and Eight; 3) Applications of CBR in other fields, such as food science, automatic control and mechanical industry, are specifically presented in Chapters One, Three and Nine, respectively.

This book brings audiences the enchanting melodies passing down from generation to generation in the Zhuang community, which are on the brink of extinction. Specifically, it sheds light on the origin, evolution and artistic features of Zhuang folk song in the first place, and then it shifts to their English translation based on meta-functional equivalence, through which the multi-aesthetics of Zhuang folk song have been represented. At length, forty classic Zhuang folk songs have been selected, and each could be sung bilingually in line with the stave. This book benefits researchers and students who are interested in music translation as well as the Zhuang ethnic music, culture and literature. It also gives readers an insight into musicology, anthropology and intercultural study.

Agricultural automation is the emerging technologies which heavily rely on computer-integrated management and advanced control systems. The tedious farming tasks had been taken over by agricultural machines in last century, in new millennium, computer-aided systems, automation, and robotics has been applied to precisely manage agricultural production system. With agricultural automation technologies, sustainable agriculture is being developed based on efficient use of land, increased conservation of water, fertilizer and energy resources. The agricultural automation technologies refer to related areas in sensing & perception, reasoning & learning, data communication, and task planning & execution. Since the literature on this diverse subject is widely scattered, it is necessary to review current status and capture the future challenges through a comprehensive monograph. In this book we focus on agricultural automation and provide critical reviews of advanced control technologies, their merits and limitations, application areas and research opportunities for further development. This collection thus serves as an authoritative treatise that can help researchers, engineers, educators, and students in the field of sensing, control, and automation technologies for production agriculture.

Part memoir, part history, part journalistic expose, Trip is a look at psychedelic drugs, literature, and alienation from one of the twenty-first century's most innovative novelists--The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test for a new generation. A Vintage Original. While reeling from one of the most creative--but at times self-destructive--outpourings of his life, Tao Lin discovered the strange and exciting work of Terence McKenna. McKenna, the leading advocate of psychedelic drugs since Timothy Leary, became for Lin both an obsession and a revitalizing force. In Trip, Lin's first book-length work of nonfiction, he charts his recovery from pharmaceutical drugs, his surprising and positive change in worldview, and his four-year engagement with some of the hardest questions: Why do we make art? Is the world made of language? What happens when we die? And is the imagination more real than the universe? In exploring these ideas and detailing his experiences with psilocybin, DMT, salvia, and cannabis, Lin takes readers on a trip through nature, his own past, psychedelic culture, and the unknown.

A" Slate" Best Book of the Year
From one of this generation's most talked about and enigmatic writers comes a deeply personal, powerful, and moving novel about family, relationships, accelerating drug use, and the lingering possibility of death.
"Taipei" by Tao Lin is an ode--or lament--to the way we live now. Following Paul from New York, where he comically navigates Manhattan's art and literary scenes, to Taipei, Taiwan, where he confronts his family's roots, we see one relationship fail, while another is born on the internet and blooms into an unexpected wedding in Las Vegas. Along the way--whether on all night drives up the East Coast, shoplifting excursions in the South, book readings on the West Coast, or ill advised grocery runs in Ohio--movies are made with laptop cameras, massive amounts of drugs are ingested, and two young lovers come to learn what it means to share themselves completely. The result is a suspenseful meditation on memory, love, and what it means to be alive, young, and on the fringe in America, or anywhere else for that matter.

At some point, maybe twenty minutes after he'd begun refreshing Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Gmail in a continuous cycle - with an ongoing, affectless, humorless realisation that his day 'was over' - he noticed with confusion, having thought it was early morning, that it was 4:46PM.

Taipei is an ode - or lament - to the way we live now.

Following Paul from New York, where he comically navigates Manhattan's art and literary scenes, to Taipei, Taiwan, where he confronts his family's roots, we see one relationship fail, while another is born on the internet and blooms into an unexpected wedding in Las Vegas.

From one of this generation's most talked-about and enigmatic writers comes a deeply personal and uncompromising novel about memory, love, and what it means to be alive.

This book systematically discusses (a) Distributed Generation (DG), which operates in a single, stand-alone controllable system mode, and (b) the Microgrid (MG) powered by DG, along with the technical concepts, the impact on power systems, control and optimisation techniques, and their applications. It includes ten chapters that focus on the following five aspects: 1) An overview of distributed generation is introduced in Chapter One, and the technical concept of the microgrid is introduced in Chapter Eight with detail; 2) As the main element of distributed generation (DG), a smart inverter system for the control of active and reactive power in a grid-tied mode, which is treated as an interface between grid and the RES (Renewable Energy System), is studied concretely in Chapter Two; 3) The influence of distributed generation on power systems, including the impact of DG on the planning and operation of power systems, the impact of DG on power quality, and power system protection are concretely described and analysed in Chapters Three, Four and Five, respectively; ) The control and optimisation technologies for DG and MG. These techniques include: the Economic Model Predictive Control (EMPC) strategy for the solution of pricing management in community-based microgrids (MGs), which consider economic benefits as the control and optimisation objects; the distributed control and optimisation techniques for islanded microgrids (MGs) that consider stability as the control and optimisation objects; the intelligent load shedding for stability enhancement in an autonomous microgrid; and the recovery (restoration) control after a contingency situation. These are all investigated in Chapters Six, Seven, Eight and Nine, respectively; 5) The applications of renewable energy technology, such as efficient artisanal light fishing technologies that exploit lake light physics and light-fish interactions, are specifically presented in Chapter Ten.